Features

Excellent classical engraving

LilyPond allows musicians to produce elegant sheet music that is
easy to read. Its developer community has spent thousands of hours
developing powerful music engraving software that results in beautifully
engraved music. All of LilyPond’s style settings, font designs and
algorithms have been inspired by the finest hand-engraved music.
LilyPond output has the same strong, balanced and elegant look as the
best-engraved classical scores. This is further explained in our
Essay.

Text input

Everything is explicit

LilyPond processes text input, which contains all information
about the content of your score and can easily be read
by any human or another program. There are no obscure
settings hidden behind menu items and binary file storage.

Tweaks are robust and traceable

If you have to change anything in the layout this tweak will
also be explicitly visible in the input file in human-readable
form, so you will always be able to retrace what you’ve done.
If you should accidentally break anything you can easily revert
or modify any decision without being at the mercy of an
Undo function.

Text files are failure- and future-proof

Text files are very robust against file corruption. And as they are
human-readable, you will always be able to interpret them even if
you don’t have access to the programs that created them.

Manage your scores with version control

Text files are applicable to be managed by version control. Go
for it and experience infinite and selective undo/redo mechanisms
and the full development history of your scores. Version control
may also open up new (collaborative) workflows for you.

Usability

Effective layout choices

Spend less time with tweaking the output; LilyPond gets the
formatting correct right from the start. It determines spacing by
itself, and breaks lines and pages to provide a tight and uniform
layout. Clashes between lyrics, notes, and chords are resolved
and slurs and beams are sloped, automatically!

Mix music and text

Put fragments of music into texts without cutting and pasting
pictures. Integrate music into LaTeX or HTML seamlessly, or add
music to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice with OOoLilyPond. Plugins are
also available to allow LilyPond code in various blogs and wikis, making
online collaboration possible.

Accessibility

Text-based input also makes score-writing possible for users with
severe physical disabilities. Dexterity-impaired users who are
unable to type or control a computer mouse can use
speech-recognition software to edit LilyPond files. Even users
who are totally blind can use screen-reading software to write
LilyPond files – an impossible task in graphical-based
score-writing programs.
You can see a spectacular score on Examples.

Editor diversity

Several developers, themselves active LilyPond users,
have written tools specifically aimed at making the process of editing
LilyPond files faster and more effective; you are not tied to
a single user interface but can use different tools for different tasks.
You can even use a full-fledged LilyPond editor at home and use your
mobile phone’s notepad app to edit the files on the go. For some examples,
see Easier editing.

Extensible design

Easy management of style sheets

All layout settings can be changed to suit your personal typographical
taste. So you can easily write style sheets that change every aspect of
LilyPond scores’ default appearance. As these are also written as text
and can be stored in separate files you can simply switch between two
stylesheets to produce scores with a completely different appearance or
layout.
You want to print a score on A4 paper and project it with a beamer,
one system per page? LilyPond’s layout engine will effortlessly produce
both from the same input.

Add your own functions

If that still is not enough, there is always the built-in
scripting language Scheme, which can access LilyPond’s layout
engine at the same level as LilyPond itself does, making it
a very powerful tool.
Settings, variables and functions are all documented in the
comprehensive program reference manual.

Process scores programmatically

LilyPond input files can fully be edited or even generated by programs
and scripts. This can for example be used for algorithmical composition.
But you can also access the musical content for analysis, or manage
input fragments in a database. There are no limitations except your
imagination.

Create new tools using LilyPond

As LilyPond isn’t a monolithic GUI program but a command line tool it
can be used from within other applications too. This way it is possible
to equip tools like e.g. web applications with LilyPond’s engraving
power. There already exist several online tools using LilyPond.

Environment

Excellent support

LilyPond runs on all popular platforms: GNU/Linux, MacOS X, and
Windows. LilyPond comes with extensive documentation and hundreds
of example files. There is an active user community answering
questions on the lilypond-user mailing list, offering you friendly
help. The response time is usually very short, and often brillant
solutions to reported problems are developed. Thanks to the close
interaction with the development team such solutions are regularly
included in LilyPond itself.
Read more in Community.

Free software

LilyPond can be downloaded free of charge! Yep - It’s free. Get
it from the download page.

It’s also free (as in “speech”) software. It comes with source
code, and permission to change and copy it. So, are you irritated
by a bug, or yearning for a feature? Simply add it yourself, or
pay someone else to do it.
Read more on Freedom.

Where now?

Still not convinced? Look at some specific Examples. If you’ve
already decided to try LilyPond, first read about our
Text input.